Free SSL Certificates from Let's Encrypt to Drive HTTP/2 Adoption

It's widely stated that the use of HTTP/2 requires SSL/TLS encryption. This technically not true, but as clients only support HTTP/2 via SSL it's a defacto-requirement. With browser and server support for the new protocol version, the only hurdle is the overhead of setting up encryption.

So while it's been easy to be HTTPS enabled for quite a while, it was not a necessity for many sites. Unlike a DNS change going with SSL/TLS was not a hard requirement for go-live. Sites delivering news and other content static content have had little incentive to spend extra resources in going encrypted.

Mozilla, the company behind Firefox and other popular products, announced in April 2015 that they aim to Deprecate non-secure HTTP. Mozilla and other companies have put their money where their mouth is and are sponsoring a free Certificate Authority called Let's Encrypt:

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

With zero cost, low overhead technical setup, added security, improvement in SEO visibility and faster performance - selling HTTP/2 to non technical folk will get a whole lot easier. 2016 is going to be big for the foundations of the web.